24.02. 2026 Barcelona wins the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, for the second time. Here’s what made it work. Barcelona has been named one of 24 global winners of the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge 2025-2026, selected from more than 630 cities worldwide. The city receives $1 million and operational support to scale Renovation-as-a-Service — a new model for […]
12.02.2026 Guide for Social Organisations – Guidance on Participating in Social Impact Contracts (SIC) UpSocial publishes the Guide for Social Organisations – Guidance on Participating in a Social Impact Contract (SIC), a document aimed at social service providers that are considering acting as service providers in payment-by-results contracts. The document, developed by UpSocial with the
07.11.2025 Guide for Public Administrations – Guidelines for Tendering Social Impact Contracts (SIC) UpSocial publishes the guide for public administrations – Guidelines for Tendering Social Impact Contracts (SIC), a resource for designing, tendering, and implementing SICs as public procurement mechanisms aimed at innovation, prevention, and evidence-based accountability. The document, developed with the support of the

04.06.2021 Nine cities join the new RRR project What do Belo Horizonte, Bilbao, Dublin, Guadalajara, Montreal, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Turin, and Warsaw have in common — besides being great cities to live in? That they have all been selected to be part of the Respond, Rebuild, Reinvent (RRR) project, implemented by the OECD and funded
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21.06.2021 Rotterdam, one of the 50 winning cities of the 2021 Global Mayors Challenge Bloomberg Philanthropies has announced the 50 Champion Cities that are promoting the most remarkable innovations in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic – and Rotterdam is among them. The idea from Rotterdam is to encourage participation from the private sector and
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05.07.2021 La Mesa: collective intelligence for a paradigm shift in food systems A social lab to co-create innovative and scalable solutions that improve universal access to sustainable food, particularly for people in vulnerable situations. The serious consequences that both the lack of food and its poor nutritional quality or the presence of toxic residues have
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07.07.2021 Two social challenges as a shared learning ground Representatives from the nine cities participating in the RRR project selected the two Covid-19-related challenges that will guide the joint learning and collaboration process on the potential of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) in recovery. On 29 June, the Respond, Rebuild, Reinvent (RRR) consortium met
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22.07.21 Deepening collaboration between local governments and social and solidarity economy ecosystems The cities and consortium members driving the RRR project met again to identify what knowledge they could share with one another and to define cross-cutting experiences and approaches they would like to learn about – taking another step forward in peer learning.. Building

22.09.2021 EuroPACE: lessons learned from an H2020 project In August 2021, the EuroPACE project came to an end after three years of implementation. Funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme, its goal was to make home energy renovation simpler, more accessible, and more reliable for citizens. The model integrates affordable financing and
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30.11.2021 Innovative collaboration between cities and their social and solidarity economy ecosystems Social and solidarity economy (SSE) ecosystems not only take economic benefits into account but also consider social impact, distinguishing them from traditional businesses. For this reason, cities are innovating by collaborating with these ecosystems to accelerate recovery processes following the emergence of COVID-19.